The new avatar of medical imaging-PACS healthcare

The PACS (Picture archiving and communication system) healthcare is a new addition to the arsenal of advanced health-care services provided to the common man. A PACS is a form of medical imagery, the technology being utilised to efficiently store and allow ease of access to images or other similar documents from a large set of origin systems. E-images, reports, documents et cetera are digitally transfused by means of this system, thus removing any manual addition or elimination or modification of files in databases. The PACS healthcare has an universal file-format, called the ‘Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine’ or DICOM.

Scanned reports may be embedded into the PACS, using the standard format of the consumer-industry, like PDFs, that is, after it has been channelled into DICOM. There are four components of a PACS; there are source applications for medical imaging, in forms of X-ray images, MRI reports, scans and so on; a robust networking system for convenient patient-data and records transmission; workstations and places for the correct comprehension and classification of images; and, last but not the least, the archives to store and retrieve data and images as and when required, the most important segment.

Now, if the PACS healthcare is merged with the advanced web tech of the recent era, this form of healthcare service will not only eliminate the time and distance barriers, usually attributed to traditional films of images, but will also be efficient enough to provide correct and real-time imagery when needed. It is working wonders.There are quite a few uses of PACS healthcare. Most importantly, it eliminates the need of any hard-copies of data, records and images. It achieves this replacement by means of medical image archives. Nowadays, with the reduced cost of electronic storage, PACS healthcare is at a higher rank than the ordinary traditional film-based images.

Then again, it also allows the feature of teleradiology, that is, permits medicosa from different geographic locations to access the identical image or record at the same time. Distance education and tele-diagnosis are not uncommon, and all this because this system enlarges on schemes of traditional methods by allowing off-site reviewing too. This form of healthcare service serves as an integrated basis for e-images. Advanced forms, like EHR’s, and HIS are avatars of this tech. PACS also serves the purpose of being used by radiology personnel to efficiently control the execution of patient examinations and diagnosis, termed as ‘Radiology Workflow Management’.

The PACS is ably developed to operate on images of different sources, with the likes of the ultrasound imaging, MRI images, nuclear medicinal images, PET and CT scan images, mammograms, histopathology et cetera. New image extensions are being included to make sure that operations can be performed on them too. Medicine aspects beyond the simple broad categories are also developing imagery that can be embedded into PACS too.

PACS healthcare service is now offered by seemingly all of the major imagery-equipment-manufacturers and developers. Medical IT firms and private ventures are also opening up avenues in this field. Also, the primary software for PACS is available for free on the World Wide Web too.It is thus imperative that healthcare providers adopt the PACS technology to archive digitalised medical images from varied medical devices. The shift from the traditional and cumbersome film-based image processing to this new futuristic concept has brought up cost-related issues, but then, one can rest assured, it is totally worth it. By - Rounak Bose

Author Bio : 

MEDICOSA is a networked patient care ecosystem on cloud to enable medical fraternity for offering integrated healthcare services to their patients. For more information about PACS Health Care please visit MEDICOSA.